Environmental Issue & Sick Building Syndrome Blog

It just like just about everything we can talk about. There is good and bad. And there is bad and worse.

We usually talk about mold in our homes as “bad,” when it is very high……….and often it is.

Actually, some people differentiate between the molds that can be bad for us and the “really bad molds.” Now keeping in mind that Aspergillus can be a trigger for among many things Asthma. In my world that would be a bad thing, particularly if I had an Asthmatic child.

The distinction some people would make is: “well….is this the really bad mold you call black mold?”

For some people, not being Stachybotrys (a/k/a toxic black mold) makes it not a problem, even if they have someone that could become acutely ill from the mold that is present in the amount found in testing.

The question of it is bad mold needs answered after the amount of mold is determined by a test and that information considered in the context of the health of the people exposed to the mold.

We all pretty much know that there are molds that trigger respiratory disease. We breath the mold in and it attacks our lungs.

What we need to know is that we have molds that attack the eyes. We have others that can cause skin infections. Other molds can attack the nervous system. Still others will trigger auto-immune disease.

Molds are used in many powerful drugs, which also means that a variety of mold can affect people in a wide variety of ways.

Then we have a number of molds that can create psychotic reactions. Ergot mold grows on a variety of grains and produces lysergic acid which is a hallucinogen and has in its history events of triggering the Salem Witch Trails and the “Great Fear” during the French Revolution.

The bottom line answer to: “Do we have a bad mold problem?” does not end with the question is there black mold or not? The full answer is “That depends…upon the type and amount of mold and the individual characteristics of the people that are exposed to the mold.”